A U.S. patient safety think tank, the ECRI Institute, has released its 2015 Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for Healthcare Organizations, and data integrity makes the list.

While patient safety is a top priority for every health care organization, knowing where to focus patient safety efforts can be a formidable task. To help guide health care organizations in fulfilling that task, the ECRI Institute has developed the 2015 Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for Health Care Organizations.

"This is more than just a list; it's a reminder that, despite the attention given to patient safety over the last 15 years or so, we can do better," William Marella, MBA, executive director of operations and analytics, ECRI Institute Patient Safety Organization said in a news release. "Health care providers, regardless of what setting they practice in, can start with our top 10 list of patient safety concerns and use it to guide their own discussions about patient safety and improvement initiatives."

What we hope people will do is use these as an opportunity to reflect on whether or not these hazards exist in their institutions. Some are more applicable to one setting than another and then there are other topics like care coordination and medication safety that are applicable to the entire continuum of care. So we hope people reflect on this to see whether or not they have appropriate processes in place for dealing with these particular hazards.

Alarms

Alarm hazards from inadequate configuration policies and practices top the list this year. Over the past few years, much of the scientific literature on alarms has focused on a phenomenon known as alarm fatigue—a condition that can lead to alarms missed by providers who are overwhelmed by, distracted by, or desensitized to, the multiple alarms that activate.

"In addition to missed alarms that can result from excessive alarm activations, hospitals also have to be concerned about alarms that don't activate when a patient is in distress," says Rob Schluth, senior project officer, ECRI Institute. "In our experience, alarm‐related adverse events—whether they result from missed alarms or from unrecognized alarm conditions—often can be traced to alarm systems that were not configured appropriately."

Data Integrity in Health IT

Health IT also featured prominently on ECRI's patient safety list again this year, concentrating on data integrity from incorrect or missing data in EHRs and other health IT systems. While health information technology (IT) offers numerous potential benefits, it can create new and unforeseen safety risks if it is not “designed appropriately, implemented carefully, and used thoughtfully”, ECRI says.

When we look at health IT-related errors that are submitted to ECRI Institute, about half of them relate to data integrity in one way or another. Wrong information gets into the patient’s chart. Correct information gets into the wrong patient’s chart or the information doesn’t get put in at all. So how the EHR is used is leading to patient safety issues. If we don’t find a way to deal with that, it’s something could potentially limit the effectiveness of things like clinical decision support and the electronic medical record that we’ve spent so much time and money investing in over the past five years.

Patience violence

Patient violence ranked third on this year's list and refers to the challenges hospitals face with respect to the safety and well‐being of staff, patients, and visitors.

The range and impact of patient violence across hospitals is not limited to incidents that make the headlines but includes clinical staff who sometimes feel abandoned and left without the resources to do their jobs safely. ECRI says there are at least 15 patient safety incidents a day, according to one PSO member hospital.

Photo: Melissa Wiese

According to the Leap Frog Institute, more than one million US patients are given the wrong medication or the wrong dose of medication while in hospital and more than 440,000 patients die every year because of hospital safety problems.

The stakes are high where patient safety is concerned so the ECRI Top 10 List of Patient Safety Concerns is definitely worth a closer look. You can download the full report on the ECRI website here.

innovatemedtec.com uses cookies to enhance your experience. By using this site you agree to have cookies placed on your computer. To learn more, please see our cookies policy and privacy policy pages. Thanks for reading.